✦ Who He Is ✦
Ohad Naharin was born in 1952 on Kibbutz Mizra in northern Israel, the son of an actor and psychologist and a mother who taught the Feldenkrais method and worked as a choreographer and dancer. He did not begin dancing until his twenties, joining Batsheva Dance Company in 1974 with little formal training. During his first year there, guest choreographer Martha Graham invited him to join her own company in New York, and over the following years he also studied at the School of American Ballet and Juilliard, and danced a season with Maurice Béjart's Ballet du XXe Siècle in Brussels.
Naharin began choreographing in New York in 1980 and spent the following decade making work for companies including Batsheva, the Kibbutz Contemporary Dance Company, and Nederlands Dans Theater. In 1990 he returned to Tel Aviv as Batsheva's artistic director, establishing the company's junior division, Batsheva - the Young Ensemble, the same year, and began developing the movement practice that would define the company for decades. After almost thirty years in the role, Naharin stepped down as artistic director in 2018 while remaining Batsheva's house choreographer, continuing to create and restage work for the company.
Signature Works
Minus 16 (1999)
Naharin's most widely performed work, a collage built from excerpts of his own earlier repertory and staged by companies around the world, closing with dancers pulling audience members onstage. Read the full profile →
Anaphaza (1993)
A large ensemble work that includes an early version of the "Echad Mi Yodea" sequence - dancers in suits, seated in a semicircle of chairs, stripping down verse by verse to a rock setting of the Passover song - later folded into Minus 16.
Sadeh21 (2011)
A large-scale, 21-section work built directly from Gaga principles, moving through accumulating "fields" of ensemble and solo material rather than a fixed narrative. Read the full profile →
Deca Dance
An ongoing, frequently reassembled anthology program that repackages excerpts from across Naharin's repertory into a single touring evening, functioning as an accessible entry point to his body of work.
Style & Method
Naharin's central creation is Gaga, a movement language and daily training practice he developed gradually after taking over Batsheva. Gaga asks dancers - and, in its public class format, non-dancers - to work from internal sensation and imagery rather than from mirrors or counted, named steps, building stamina, physical availability, and a distinctive quality of movement that is grounded, explosive, and unusually alert to texture.
That practice feeds directly into his choreography: Batsheva's company class generates raw improvised material that Naharin and his dancers shape into set repertory, keeping a visible line between daily training and the finished stage work. Because Gaga is taught openly in public classes far beyond Batsheva, it has spread further into general dance culture than most choreographic techniques tied to a single company, and it has shaped younger choreographers who passed through the company, including Hofesh Shechter, who danced under Naharin before founding his own company in London.
Legacy
Naharin turned a mid-size Tel Aviv company into one of contemporary dance's most technically distinct ensembles, and Gaga's reach as a public class format has made his influence felt well outside professional dance, in studios worldwide that have nothing to do with Batsheva. His life and work were the subject of the 2015 documentary Mr. Gaga, which introduced his story to audiences far beyond the dance world.
His decision to remain house choreographer after 2018, rather than step away from Batsheva entirely, was designed to keep Gaga's originator directly involved in the company's repertory even as formal artistic leadership passed to others - a succession model that keeps his choreographic voice active at the company that built it.